The Terrorization of the Defenseless

This post is going to be hard for all of us, but please stay with it for a little while. I know I am taking a chance at alienating some readers by writing about this but I don’t know of any other way of moving the unmoved to see the threat that we all face. The Beast we face trades on our inability to discuss taboo subjects. It has learned to thrive, to breed sedition and perversion in the shade created by the great living tree of respect we in the west have nurtured to shelter the opinions, private lives and religious feelings of individuals. I propose that we need to shine light into the dark recesses they inhabit. We need to expose their abuses no matter how dark. Indeed, the darker they are the more we need to expose them.

If this marks me as a Neo-Con, so be it. I was not always like that; I was once a liberal American Jew who was constitutionally opposed to applying my own beliefs and standards to other people, especially people from other cultures. I felt that my respect for and awe of the “differences” somehow would inoculate me and my people (maybe even all people) from becoming victims of intolerance ever again.

Then I had a brush with the evil that I call The Beast. I told that story in my first post on this blog. That encounter was the first time I felt The Beast’s hot breath on the back of my neck. On that day I began the process of awakening to the threat that is always there. The fright of seeing the threat rise up against my five-year-old daughter in the form of my friend’s little boy, shocked me out of my reverie. I had to face the fact that this threat was a direct result of how the Islamist movement seeks to deform and murder the future through child abuse. Far from having mercy on them for their innocence and helplessness, the Islamists show a kind of unholy opportunism in which they rush to twist and torture that innocence. I had to admit to myself that here is horror beyond my ability to understand, let alone control with my adamant tolerance and acceptance.

Of course, my encounter was only a searing but infinitesimal splatter of molten hate that happened to pop into my life. It was not until I looked back in the direction from which it had come that I caught sight of its source. When first I glimpsed that vast, white hot, creaking, lava flow of blind hatred and dogma that is bearing down on us all I could not take it all in at once. The feeling of dread that filled me was overwhelming. I have not had a single day in the nearly twenty years since then that I have not thought about it.

I know that the direction I am headed in at this point runs against the grain here in The Free World. I know that many of you, if you have gotten this far, are feeling very uncomfortable reading these kinds of things about other people. Most of us studied the classic case of “yellow press” and the Spanish American War in middle school. We all understand how prejudice poisons everything it touches. We have lived through the continuing transformation of the west into the most tolerant and open culture that has ever existed. We continue to face our history, treasure our present and strive to improve our future. We are all taught from the time we first watch Sesame Street that respect for others and tolerance of differences are the cornerstone of being a good person. We know only too well the terrible consequences of this kind of talk. Our education and Judeo-Christian ethos has made a lot of progress in coaxing much of the prejudice and xenophobia out of us. So, it’s natural to feel as though it is simply wrong even to bring these things up. If you are feeling this way, it is understandable but I ask you to bear with me.

As a reasonably well read American with an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and a Master of Science in Communications, I was not unaware of some aspects of Muslim culture and the difficulty of understanding and communicating about those differences; but I was still very much under the spell of the moral relativism that rides on the back of multiculturalism. So, when I had my early brush with the Beast, it shocked me. It inspired me to think and write about its cause and meaning. Some of my readers have found an urgent personal meaning in it too. Others have not been interested in or touched by the story though. Many have been offended that I bring it up and try to understand it. If you are one of those, I want to reach you before it is your child facing the death threat, your friend strapped into an airline seat as a terrorist flies the plane into a skyscraper at 500 miles per hour or your daughter being stoned to death in a public park for the crime of having been overpowered and then raped by four men.

These are not things I made up to vilify and demonize all Muslims, they are real things that were really done by some real Muslims because of the teachings of mainstream Muslim culture. You have to pay attention to what they do and where they come from and you have to understand they do it with intent and purpose.

If the relatively small shock that affected my family has no effect on you and the plight of Millions of Muslim women does not do it either, I have to bring up the most dire of all the indictments against Muslim culture and the Arab fundamentalists in particular.

Above and beyond recruiting them as suicide bombers, rock throwers and human shields, dwarfing the dreadful cult of blood and hate they teach them from kindergarten on. There is the pandemic of violence toward and sexual abuse of children in the Islamic World. The Islamic child abuse problem is the most immense and covert tragedy in the modern world. Children are the most abjectly powerless members of any society, so they are also the best test of the inherent goodness or evil of that society. Their cries of pain and despair are easily kept from the outside world so they are at the mercy of those whose responsibility it is to care for them. When they are used for political and ideological purposes it is bad enough- these are expressed publicly so there is at least some moderation by the standards of the larger society (such as they might be). But with physical and sexual abuse there is often an absolute protection for the abuser. The abuse takes place in the confines of the home- the very place that should be the child’s ultimate shelter.
The tragedy of it is that along with the moral and cultural relativism that we in the liberal west often use to excuse and conceal the horror of:
•the continuing human slave trade
•the destruction of Darfour
•the honor killing of women
•the social repression of women
•the intolerance of infidel and non believers
and
•the inability to engage in the most rudimentary standards of modern discourse
…we also entertain the naïve and mistaken belief (more of a hope) that all people are endowed with the same sense of what is right and wrong. This is one of our most dangerous delusions.

The magnitude of this vast tragedy can be glimpsed through the statement of Gert Kapelari a UNICEF ( a stronghold of uncritical support of uncritical support for Arab causes) delegate who was quoted in this 2004 BBC (usually a bastion of multiculturalism) story as saying that the staggering truth of the Arab child abuse problem is not well understood because true numbers are unavailable. Here is how the article put it:
Child protection specialists said the fact that there were no fixed statistics on abuse in the Arab world was shocking, particularly because they know it is widespread.

The number of reported cases is very low, they argued, and that belies the truth about what is really going on.

Gert Kapelari, a delegate for the United Nations children's agency Unicef, said a survey among school children in eight Arab countries showed that the numbers were staggering.

"Where we asked children to what extent they have been victims of abuse or other forms of violence, what comes out of the preliminary findings are really shocking," he said. "We have to conclude that more than half of the children are, in one way or another, victims of violence and even sometimes of severe abuse,"
Now, I know that we are all civilized people here and we would never want to be accused of saying anything bigoted or prejudicial about another culture; but, if Kapelari is anywhere close to accurate in his assessment, the majority of Arab children (and possibly all children in Islamic countries) have much more to fear from his or her own father and uncles than from the licentious western morals, Liberal media, U.S. Marines and Israeli Defense Force that the rage filled mullahs and street protesters blame for everything.

It is not cultural chauvinism on our part to talk about this; it is our duty as human beings. Here, for those who need them, is a link to more details on how the Islamic clergy rationalize and foster this tragedy. The child abuse is not so well acknowledged as the second class status of women in the Islamic World but it is all part of the same terrorization of the defenseless that should illustrate to any but the most suicidally liberal what is in store for the world if Islamofascism should ever get the upper hand. The sickening state of terror and oppression that those children live under mirrors the suffering of their mothers and is a metaphor for the condition of all humankind if their dream of a World-wide Caliphate come into being.
It is also an absolutely reliable predictor of the insanity that, later in life, not only perpetuates the cycle of abuse in its own society but moves them to plan and/or celebrate acts like the callous slaughter of thousands of innocent airline passengers and office workers.

Those in the west who believe the fables that the policies of western countries, the existence of Israel and the presence of the U.S. in Iraq (as we try to stabilize that country after deposing one of the most infamous tyrants of all time) are to blame for the discontents of the Islamists should be forced to work for six months in a pediatric or Gynecological ward in any hospital in the Arab world. That might give them a clearer idea of what it is that torments the present and cripples the future of the Arabs and from whence the wellspring of rage that powers so much of their political and religious life gushes.

We all need to keep in mind that this fleeting moment in the history of the world, when the greatest power on earth is also the champion of the finest and most democratic impulses of the human spirit is the exception not the rule. We must not let this best hope for humanity slip through our fingers by false modesty or self-effacing reluctance. We need to face the danger, understand it and defeat it.